Nah bro I’m vegan I don’t use animal products and my Doc Martens are made out of vegan leather

Dunking on them is a mistake. Playing the culture game from a leftist perspective is still playing the culture game, and as far as chuds are concerned it’s indistinguishable from liberals. The point of the culture game is to keep people talking past one another, to prevent a true dialogue. Participation is reinforcement.

How exactly you respond varies with the person. For older people, your best bet is to agree with them where possible and introduce a more material analysis without directly contradicting them. Frame it as agreement. Establish a historical trend, tie it back to something they lived through. This is easy, because the “bad” billionaires don’t actually have a transformative project; the goal is and always was the status quo. We’re living through Stagflation in the 21nd Century, so that’s a good place to start.

If someone has built their self-identity around “truth-seeking” the conspiracies, they aren’t about to give that up for a mundane material explanation. They seek the thrill of an appealing narrative, but need it to be ‘real’ to justify suspending disbelief. Engaging in fiction that knows and presents itself as fiction would be too “childish”. This gives you more freedom to dunk, as your goal is to convince anyone else who may be listening and not the “truth-seeker” themselves. However, using the same method of politely agreeing where possible can throw them off balance. They want to have a shouting match, to call you a satanist lizard-lover, someone to physicalize the narrative as an “agent of Them” walking around in the real world. Politely introducing the mundane material forces them to up-the-ante, making the nonsense more apparent to any listeners.

Why would there be a group of good billionaires at all? They’d make more money getting you to eat the bugs.

Call this person a simp for the rich, because they are, no rich people care, and if what the other person is saying is true, we should jail all billionaires just to be safe. You don’t want to eat the bugs, do you?

I don’t know honestly I think a lot of people on this site have a kneejerk reaction to want to disagree with CHUDs no matter what they say because they don’t like them.

Like the general metaphorical truth is that the ownership class is going to use neoliberalism to continue turning the crank on the working class ad absurdum, and that’s ultimately true. The reason you’re having trouble telling them why they’re wrong is because they aren’t, they just may have a wrong idea about what to do about that.

It’s much more rhetorically powerful to not show a desperate need to disagree on every point. Agree where reasonable, and then push the left position like “… and that’s why we should be dedicating all our resources to liquidating the ownership class.”

A lot of CHUDs are much more radicalizable than libs, because many are at least starting from the position that this is all fucked. But you won’t be able to radicalize them if you let them trick you into defending neoliberalism (which is ultimately what they probably think leftists want anyways).